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So I was sick February. I usually am. XD;;;;;
Man, this year seems to be running full tilt. Its been hard to keep up. But one thing that I always look forward to every month is the awesome funpacks sent from the always awesome Dinosaur Dracula.
This month's theme? Let's go back to when you were a kid. Grocery stores. Vending machines. You know what I'm talking about. I used to peruse those machines, sticky from years of...lord only knows what, waiting for you to pop a quarter (or 3 for those high priced ones) to get something nice and cheap. Myself, I preferred the sparkly stickers. I have a thing about shiny things and stickers, but then I grew up as a girl in the 80s and 90s. One can hardly fault me on that.
Cowabunga.
The Coke Pogs were pretty good...I think I actually had some of these as a kid, when our middle school eventually banned them for gambling. Yeah...I know, but school rules are often arbitrary and whimsical. The Pepsi cards are actually really awesome, as they depict different ads and pictures throughout the company's existance, and include cute comics and super pretty pin up pics with pretty girls. Based on that alone I'd drink more Pepsi.
Of note in this stack are the Fern Gully cards. When I was in the art department at SJSU, I used to take classes with Sheldon Borenstein, who would fly up from SoCal every friday to teach 2 back to back 3 hour drawing classes. He was AWESOME. FG was a movie he worked on, as well as He-Man and BraveStarr, which I watched as a child, and he always had a story about the industry that was amusing and insightful. I loved FG so much as a kid, being a huge Robin Williams fan as well as Tim Curry, and if you haven't seen the film, you GOTTA. Those cards remind me of the few good times I had with Sheldon's class, as well as my own cartoon childhood. So glad those were in there. :3
I remember Madballs (never owned them though, I was a chickenshit of a kid and didn't like gross toys. I know hella lame of me XD), and these toys are some sort of wild love child of Madballs and Ghoulies, which I'm most familiar from X-Entertainment's review of the first, second, third, and fourth movies. Yeah.....they made 4. You remember the Leprechaun movies and how many they did for those? Well, sometimes a filmmaker's gotta park a stool next to the franchise and milk that mother for all its worth.
That metaphor was getting away from me. Let's move on.
Treaties!! Delicious crunchy Takis, a Twizzler, and the Water of Life itself: Kool-Aid. Pink lemonade. Is pink lemonade pink cuz of strawberries? I never knew. Or is it like the mysterious BLUE flavoring from the 90s, and the PINK in pink lemonade is its own flavor profile?
Humanity may never know.
Dino Drac specimen this month is a Universal Studios pog. Man, I've been racking up the pog game....I can't wait to start playing again. XD My Coke ones didn't have a slammer (the heavier one you'd use for better flipping, for those of you who I know were born after the wonderage we call the 90s), so I'm prolly gonna have to make one, or find one eventually. In middle school, despite the fact they were banned, they were banned for playing with, not collecting, trading, or of course selling, and if you really think about it, if you're gonna ban something, ban it the whole way, right? Then again, I never understood school admins. The shop class some kids took had a teacher who had a laser cutter for acrylic plastic, as well as shop tools. so a lot of kids who took shop would make slammers for themselves and sold extras. I took shop but we never got to make slammers and spent more time building paper rockets to fire off air rocket launchers, or wood working, where I learnt how to engrave and stain woods, which in retrospect, was actually something I wished my high school had. Hell my high school didn't even have a kiln like my middle school, so I had to give up ceramics.
Man, I didn't expect pogs to make me take a walk down memory lane. Maybe next time I'll talk about the last time we got El Nino and it flooded my school and that was the year I broke my ankle and was in crutches for 6 months.
Another vending machine creature, slime with googly eyes. At the after school teaching job I have, we make slime from sodium borate and polyvinyl alcohol and some watered down paint.
Lately Micahel's has been pimping slime making, which is made from glue and borax, so its more similar to putty than the Gak stuff we have, which is also the stuff in these samples. I love slime, so having these slime pets really amuses me. If they glowed in the dark, they would be the best pet creature next to pet rocks.
I say this cuz we just got a puppy a couple months ago and that's why I've been behind in EVERYTHING. @_@ You don't have to potty train slime.
The mini poster this month has tons of treats like bubble gum and candy. I have probably ingested nearly everything in the poster, but my favorites were the Bonkers and the Push Pop, which if I recall correctly, used to have a clip that you could clip to your shirt pocket like a pen. God I used to have like 4 of those clipped to my hoodie pocket in different flavors in case I was jonesing for different flavors in one day. I'm a sugar fiend, what can I say?
The pixel Dino Drac sticker is totally sickhouse. I love pixel art. I might skip the stickerbook for this and put it on my sketchbook. My Isabelle sticker would enjoy the company. I can't imagine the conversations a vampiric dinosaur would have with an anthropomorphic puppy girl, but I'll assume it'd have to be something epic. Or coffee related.
Newsletter for this month gives inventory on the contents as well as hints at the unadvertised stuff in the funpack, and the art challenge, which asks for a dinosaur wearing forgotten fashions.
So I drew a member of the Alvarezsauridae dinosaur family. Why? Because I wanted it to wear my favorite forgotten fashion, which were legwarmers. These dinorsaurs were known to have long legs, and apparently may have been the beginnings of flightless birds. I dunno, I kinda drew it in a fever dream. I threw in a scrunchy too.
The essay on vending machines really brought back memories of those coin operated prizes. like I said, i used to live for the stickers, mostly cuz they were often shiny, sparkly, and gigantic. Sticky hands were also my usual go-tos, though they usually only lasted a few flings before they would be covered in filth that would rival cheap movie theater floors. I also loved the close cousins of those toys, which had little men or bipedal creatures with hands and feet made of the same sticky substance that you flung at the walls and watched as the gravity and the low tack on the sticky made them walk down walls. If you were REALLY lucky, they would actually walk down the wall, flipping over and catching itself like some herky-jerky spider. Most of the time, yours were too dry and they'd just freefall off the wall immediately after making contact with it. It was a crap shoot.
I've yet to do the physical challenge, which was to take a good amount of quarters and just go crazy and get a good haul, but I've got to plan my attack as a lot of the stores near me no longer have them in their entry ways (though the Round Table Pizza has a paltry "mini arcade" that has a couple crane games, vending machines and I think one racing game, so I wanna try that one first).
See you next month!
--Dio (2/28/17)
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